Don't Flinch
by Lorata
Summary: Cato and Clove make it to the final two, but the Capitol revokes the rule change anyway. Whichever way the wind blows - whether Clove strikes first, or Cato does - this is not a happy ending.


Clove's scream splits the air, silencing the birds in the trees around the clearing as not even the mockingjays dare to take up the sound.

For Katniss Everdeen, winded and choking back breath with blood running into her eye, and for viewers in the districts, watching at home and praying that the monster loses, the scream makes sense. It's chilling, yes — in that moment Clove is no longer a demon with a brace of steel claws she keeps in her vest but a girl, a girl only a handful of years older than sweet, innocent, infantilized Rue herself — but not unexpected. Who wouldn't scream with a boy twice her size slamming her head into the ground? The cameras always zoom in on this moment: the fear and the blood, before the light leaves the eyes and everything glazes over. Even the strongest, the nastiest, are nothing but empty sacks of bone and flesh in the end.

For Thresh, it's not enough. Clove killed that little girl, that sweet little girl with the big brown eyes and the three little siblings, the little girl who looked at him on the train that first day and told him she didn't want to be allies, whose mouth twisted ugly in her sweet little face and said _Let someone else kill me, that's solidarity enough_. The little girl is dead and Clove bragged about it, Clove with her cold, hard eyes and her spider's smile and fingers caressing her knives like she might a lover, her mocking sing-song as she pinned Twelve to the ground and promised torture — her scream is nowhere near the payback she deserves. He digs his fingers into her throat, feels the frantic fluttering of pulse beneath his thumb, and reaches back for a rock to bash in the side of her skull.

For Cato it's the beginning of the end, an unravelling of a boy made of rage and pain and arrogance who tethered his humanity on this girl who had little of her own to spare. Her scream peels off his skin, tears it right back to the sinew underneath and carves messages into his bones: _too slow, too cocky, not good enough, you failed her how could you_. He runs and runs and runs; she's never called for him, not like this, in all the years they've known each other, and he can't fail her now, he _can't_. The branches whip hard at his face unheeded, leaving bloody scratches across his cheek, and his lungs burn and his ankle rolls against the uneven ground but still he runs, faster, faster, faster.

The District 2 mentors hold their breath, waiting. More than ten dead tributes between them, they know how this story will end. It plays out in both their minds like the victory reel for another tribute in slow motion. Clove is tearing at Thresh's hands with her blunt fingernails but it won't help, and his hand has closed around her throat and the other around a rock and Cato is running faster than he's ever run in his entire life but it won't be fast enough.

Thresh will pound Clove's skull with the stone in his fist until it caves, and Cato will hold her bloody head in his lap, caress her face with his hands and plead for her to stay until she slips away. Then he'll stand, eyes burning and jaw set, and he will pick up his abandoned sword and stalk Thresh for two sleepless days and when he's done there will be nothing recognizable for District 11 to bury. Whatever happens in the end, for District 2 it all comes down to this. Thresh kills Clove, and Cato falls apart, and this game was never theirs.

Except — maybe — it is.

A hundred little details, and any one could change the course of everything. The rock lies out of reach; Thresh's fingers slip in sweat and blood and he can't get a good hold; Clove has one more knife hidden in her jacket and she rams it hard into his shoulder; Cato finds one deep, last well of speed and catches up before Thresh can make the final blow. He lands on Thresh's back snarling and spitting like a wildcat, and Clove slithers from his grip — reeling, staggering, choking and rasping for breath as long strings of saliva hang from her mouth — as Katniss Everdeen scrambles back out of the way.

Clove doesn't make the same mistake a second time. She slits Katniss' throat with brutal, ruthless efficiency, and doesn't need to wait for the cannon before she tears across the field to help Cato finish off Thresh. They'd both dropped their weapons in the frenzy, and now they're rolling and grappling and pounding each other in the heads with their huge, meaty fists. Clove picks up Cato's sword, much too heavy for her, but she lifts and swings and Cato sees her at the last second and rolls them over to expose the broad expanse of Thresh's back. She doesn't drive it in far enough the first time but Cato frees himself when the first shock of pain loosens Thresh's grip. Together they push the blade through bone and muscle and tissue as Thresh vomits blood and scrabbles against the ground and rips up grass with his spasming fingers until at last the second cannon fires.

They embrace after that, laughing and shrieking in near hysterics. Cato lifts her right off the ground, cradles the back of her head in his blood-stained fingers, and she digs her nails into the side of his neck until she draws pinpricks of blood to prove to herself he's real.

"We can do this," Cato says. "Two down. We've got this."

Clove smiles at him, beaming bright and beautiful in her bruised and battered face. Brutus and Lyme exchange wide-eyed stares and look down at their screens, where the sponsor money has begun rolling in as the great star-crossed love story ends and the gamblers scramble for the next sure thing.

They find Five in the forest, eyes too large in her face above sunken cheeks, skin pale and ashy with collarbones protruding over the top of her shirt. She'd laid a trap for them, a handkerchief strewn with berries as though they'd interrupted her meal, a last-ditch effort to get them to poison themselves with nightlock except that the Centre trained them for that too. When Cato kicks the berries aside and Clove unsheathes her knives in a showy gesture the girl actually steps out from her hiding place herself.

"Fine," she says, her voice little more than a cracked whisper. Blood beads up on the splits in her chapped lips. Dehydration burns like madness in her eyes. "Just do it."

They do, and not long after that they find the cave with Peeta Mellark, raving in the last hours of blood-fever. "Ugh," Cato says with an exaggerated grimace, and nudges Peeta's leg with his boot. "I mean, I knew where I cut him, but I didn't know it would smell so bad."

Clove rolls her eyes. "I'll do it, since you're being such a baby," she says, and kneels. Peeta dies with his eyes wide open, lips still mouthing Katniss' name.

* * *

The cannon fires, and the two of them pick their way out of the cave into the bushes and gravel at the opening. "We did it," Cato says. "We won. It's over." He laughs again, reaches down and pushes Clove's hair out of her eyes. The dirt and sweat and crusts of dried blood smear beneath his fingers, and Clove smiles.

The moment is tailor-made for the cameras, love and friendship and a flicker of the undefinable between them on display for millions of viewers looking for a replacement to the lovers from District 12, but there's something else beneath it, too. Something about the light in Clove's eyes, the curve of Cato's smile as he strokes his thumb across her cheek, is as much a _fuck you_ to the viewers as it is a love letter.

The victory announcement always follows the final cannon, and so they wait, but the silence stretches on. A full minute passes, and although the sun streams bright through the rustling green leaves and the birds sing sweetly overhead, Clove's eyebrows furrow and Cato's eyes tighten with fear. Too long; they should hear the voice by now, or the victory trumpets, or — something. Anything but this.

"Should we —" Clove says, with a vague gesture that could mean a hundred things but none that lead to hope.

"I don't know," Cato says, and they turn their faces to the sky.

* * *

In the mentor command room, Lyme turns to Brutus and forces out the words through the invisible hand squeezing her throat. "Should we —" she says, echoing the words of Clove on the ground, tinny through her headset.

Brutus shakes his head. The mentor chairs are one of the few Capitol-built furniture items big enough to fit him but in a way that's even worse, the comfort a stark contrast to their purpose. He doesn't look away from his screen, where this time it's Clove who makes the move, reaching over to slip her hand into Cato's in a gesture that's practically a scream for mercy.

"We've done all we can," he says. "We had the debate, and the vote, and —" He lets out a slow breath. "It's up to the president now."

* * *

At last: a voice. Flat, impersonal, almost robotic in its dispassionate calm, the birds fall silent as the voice delivers its message — and of course, _of course_ it wouldn't last. The rule change was never meant for them, and denied their perfect romance, the audience is after blood.

Besides, everyone knows that the killers from District 2 are only in it to win. If the rule change stuck, they probably would have tried to kill the other anyway, so as not to share the victory. Everyone knows that. It's only logical.

Clove wrenches her hand free from Cato's and flicks a blade into her palm from the sheath on her wrist. Cato takes longer to free his sword, and he raises the blade to block any knives that fly at his face just as Clove backs up to get her out of close range. They stare at each other, eyes locked and muscles tensed, and the years and seconds stretch out between them. The Capitol viewers crane forward in their seats even as those in the districts continue about their day with televisions playing in the background, as though it matters to them which killer takes the throne when their own are dead. The mentors push aside the impulse to close their eyes, instead holding and refusing to blink even as their eyes burn and the muscles in their temples ache. The Gamemakers hover fingers above the buttons for the cannon and the trumpets, and the President leans back and smiles.

The apology sits heavy and bitter in Cato's throat, thick like rotting fruit or maybe liver, spilling over onto his tongue and out between his teeth and dribbling down his chin, but he can't let it out. He can't, not if they're going to do this, because if he says he's sorry then that means he doesn't want this, though of course he doesn't. _Of course he doesn't_ , he's never wanted her dead, not once, in all the years of training with her head trapped under his armpit and her fists beating a staccato against his ribs while he laughs and laughs a split second before she pulls a knife from Snow-fucking-knows where and slices him across the ribs. Not even in the Arena, with Glimmer's head tucked against his chest and Clove curled up with her knives on the other side of the campfire, the distance between them as calculated and necessary as his onscreen showmance with Glimmer. He's never wanted this but they can't know that, they can't and they won't, because Cato swore his life and blood and breath to his district and his country and that's not a vow you can just take back.

There are words bubbling up inside Clove as well, three of them, but they're not light and airy and soft like the Capitol's famed pink champagne or the sweet song of a bird as it wings its way through the morning while flying on a sunbeam, or whatever else that usually accompanies their utterance. Clove's mind doesn't even bother coming up with them; there's nothing of the saccharine inside her and never was, even before the first trainer handed her a knife and pointed her toward the target. Instead those words pulse, like the thick rush of blood pumped through the heart to the rest of the body, like the drums of the countdown as the numbers on the cornucopia clock ticked downward. Those three words tie her to Cato as though she'd pulled out her own intestines and looped them around his throat; they're viscera and life's blood and solid white bone, and just like her insides if they leave her she'll die. Saying them now is as good as slicing her own throat when she came here to win, and she can't do that. If she peels back the weapon and the monster to those three little words then what else will they find, and Clove has a job to do. They both do, and neither of them knows how to fail.

The trainers in the Centre watch in a dead-silent room packed full of teenagers. Some of them there have trained Cato and Clove since the beginning, and unbidden half a dozen remembered fights spool out in their memories. Cato, on his back with Clove's knife to his throat and her victory sing-song setting his teeth on edge. Clove, facedown on the mats with Cato's weight pinning her there, one arm twisted behind her back as she spits curses into the green vinyl and Cato laughs. The two of them, locked and tumbling, Clove's practice knife jammed into his ribs so the trick blade disappears into the hilt, Cato's sword doing the same in her gut, the trainers calling out a stalemate and rebuking them both for taking the killing strike without looking to protect themselves from the same.

Cato and Clove have scrapped and fought a thousand times in training, and the only reason the trainers let them despite the unofficial segregation rule is that they never hold back, not ever, even if as soon as the fight is over and the trainers release them for free time they're collapsed together in a heap like puppies. They've broken bones and spilled blood and dislocated limbs from sockets, and the trainers used to bet on the outcome until they learned there's never any telling. Cato is stronger but Clove is faster and they each win half the time.

Nine times out of ten, though, the first to strike is the first to win.

* * *

Lyme swallows on a throat that feels like ants on sandpaper on fire. "Whatever happens —" she says.

Brutus still hasn't looked up from his screen. "I know."

* * *

Clove moves first.

The knife flies from her hand even as her mind fills with nothing but screaming and hot, white light, years of training and reflex bringing her arm up and over in a smooth, perfect arc, quick as a cobra. Cato ducks as soon as he sees her shoulder move because of course he does, they've played this game in training for years with everything from pilfered fruit to dull-edged training weapons to the real thing, and he knows her moves as well as he knows her own.

But — the thing is — Clove knows his, too, and when Cato dodges to the side the knife buries in his throat. The blood sprays, dark and red and savage, and Cato drops to the ground, eyes wide and teeth shining crimson as his tongue makes useless movements behind his lips. He's still gripping the sword, fists locked onto the hilt even as he convulses.

The spell breaks. Clove dashes forward, skids to her knees so hard the fabric of her pants tears and the skin scrapes loose but she doesn't notice. She rips the blade free and tosses it aside, wrestles Cato's sword from his hands and throws it behind her. Cato thrashes, the blood bubbling up from the wound in his throat, jetting out in spurts with each heartbeat, and Clove presses both hands over it but it's too late, too late.

Clove leans forward until their foreheads touch. "I'm sorry," she says, where the cameras can't see her lips move. "I'm sorry, I love you, I'm so sorry —"

They can make her kill Cato, but they can't take his final moments. Clove can't give him much but she will give him this, and so she bends and shields him from the audience as Cato's final breaths come out in sobs. Before she straightens she wipes the tears that leaked from his eyes, runs a hand down her own face to smear her own with bright scarlet warpaint, and looks up at the sky.

"Well?" Clove calls out. She wants to scream, cry, howl like a wolf-mutt and demand they turn back time and bring him back, but instead she smiles, camera-perfect and Victor-ready. "Have I convinced you?"

* * *

(or maybe…)

* * *

Cato moves first.

He has his sword and Clove has her knives, and she's out of reach of his weapon but he's well within range of hers. He's seen Clove throw a thousand knives at a thousand targets, some of them living, and he's never seen her miss, but it's never been at him, not like this. She's shaved hair from the top of his head, pinned his calf to the floor, even skewered him right in the shoulder below the collar bone, but she's never actually tried to kill him, not for real, and that means a split-second to reprogram. Clove is an amazing fighter — better than Cato, if they're getting technical, she has technique so perfect it's almost clinical while more than once he passed his tests by bludgeoning through them — but she always thinks about it first. It makes her smart, it makes her terrifying, it means in a long game you can never win against her, only by the time most people figure that out she's twirling her knife and jamming it into their eye socket.

Cato never thinks about anything. The trainers liked to ask him that, _what were you thinking Cato_ in weary voices when instead of working his way through a puzzle he smashed it with his fist. Cato always answered the same thing with a bright, cheery grin that — depending on his mood — would be more or less steely around the edges. Cato never thinks because he doesn't have to; he's had rage in his blood since he was ten years old and his parents didn't love him and nothing was fair, when he failed every spelling test and every math test and his classmates made fun of him until something snapped and he woke up to see them lying on the floor and his fists smeared with red.

 _I wasn't thinking_ , Cato said to the teachers, chin digging into his chest and shoe scuffing against the floor, mouth and eyebrows pulled into a scowl as the doctors carried away the other boy on a stretcher.

 _I wasn't thinking,_ Cato said to the trainer with a careless shrug when the boy he'd fought in practice made a dumb remark about Cato fucking Clove and whether her you-know-what was as cold as her stare and Cato immediately broke his fucking leg.

 _I wasn't thinking,_ Cato said to Lyme three days before the Arena, when he stole the last plum at dinner and Clove said _fuck you asshole_ , when Cato grinned at her and said _Love you too_ and Clove jerked back with a hiss like he'd buried a sword in her gut.

Cato doesn't think this time either. He lunges, and when his mind snaps back to the present there's a knife in his shoulder and Clove's head in his hands, twisted at a sharp angle to the rest of her body as her eyes stare out at nothing. Cato shoves her away, horrified, but then she collapses onto the ground like a mismatched collection of limbs, tumbling loose and awkward, and that's even worse. And so he gathers her up into his arms, squeezes her close against his chest, then lays her out on the rocks in a warrior's posture with her arms crossed and knives tucked into her hands.

* * *

Either way, the cannon fires and the trumpets play.

* * *

At the victory interview, Caesar Flickerman leans forward — but not too close, because the Peacekeepers frisked Clove after leaving the Two floor and before getting onstage and they found more knives each time, because Cato picked a fight with three Peacekeepers and killed two Avoxes even under heavy sedation, because Clove — because Cato — stares at him now with a smile that's made for magazine covers and eyes that belong on a corpse.

"I think it's safe to say you two had a history," Caesar says. He really, really hopes there are Peacekeepers hiding very, very close with tranquilizer guns that fire very, very fast, before Cato's fists, Clove's knife, can close the distance between them. "I don't suppose you'd like to share with us what it was? I'm sure we're all dying to know."

Some nights Caesar drinks until the world bleeds at the edges and the faces of all those brilliant, beautiful children — the terrified ones and the ones who don't know that they should be — blend into each other. Some nights he presses the injector against his forearm and pushes the button, feels the needle slide in and out in an eye-blink before the drug fills his head with rainbows and it all disappears.

Tonight Caesar hates the writers who script his questions and he hates himself for smiling and asking them anyway, and he looks at Clove — at Cato — and gives an encouraging smile.

Cato, eyes shining bright and glassy from the effects of a cocktail of tranquilizers and mood stabilizers, gives an elaborate shrug. "I think … we understood each other. We both wanted this more than anything, we always have. If she'd killed me I wouldn't blame her, I'd be happy that she won if I couldn't. I'd like to think Clove would feel the same."

"He's dead," says Clove. "Does it really matter?"

Either way, Caesar smiles and leads the audience into a round of uncertain, scattered applause.

* * *

Lyme looks at Brutus, and Brutus looks at Lyme. "What am I supposed to do now?" they ask.

"Cato won't sleep," Lyme says. "I give him enough drugs to take down a mutt and I find him out of bed, opening all the windows and making sure the doors aren't locked. Tearing apart all the drawers in the kitchen because he can't find any candles, like I'd let him have fire when he's like this. He keeps screaming at me, asking me how Clove is supposed to find her way home if everything's shut and locked and dark. I'm about to lose my mind."

"Clove keeps cutting herself," Brutus says. "Which — that's fine, that's not new, I can deal with that, but she's writing Cato's name. I keep taking the knives away, I keep thinking I've found everything sharp but the next time I see her there's another one. She's got more damn tattoos of his name on her than I thought she had blood to lose. I don't even know what I'm supposed to tell her."

Brutus looks at Lyme, and Lyme looks at Brutus. "I don't know," they say. They look down at their beer, their whiskey, and shrug. "Mine's dead."

* * *

(Time unwinds, and the victory reel runs in reverse. Clove drops Cato's sword, Cato lets Thresh go. Cato runs backwards into the woods, Thresh grabs the rock, and Clove screams Cato's name. This time the scene plays out as planned. Clove breathes her last into Cato's chest, and her eyes are the last thing he sees, sewn into the face of a brown-haired mutt before the arrow hits its mark.)

* * *

Brutus and Lyme stand shoulder to shoulder in the field, staring down at the twin rectangles of dirt against the swaying grasses. They chose their mentor plots adjacent to each other, Brutus first and then Lyme's next to his a few years later, by accident or fate or some silent agreement neither of them is too keen to talk about. Now they bury Cato and Clove beside each other in the area in between, unwilling to split them up even though it hardly matters now.

Lyme opens her hand and lets the spiked poppy pods fall onto the red earth at her feet. Beside her, Brutus drops the soft-tufted cornflower seeds onto his, then wipes his palms against each other. "That's that," Brutus says. He thins his lips and looks over the field at the mountains beyond. The Capitol makeup his stylist insisted on applying to cover the grief smudges below his eyes is smearing now, with the summer heat. His face looks a little like it's melting, like something from a surreal, drugged nightmare.

So many kids buried here, and so many more to come. Lyme presses the heel of her hand between her eyes and takes a slow breath. "Do you think, if Clove hadn't made that speech or Cato hadn't lost his balance —"

Brutus turns his head, gives her a long, flat stare. "I don't play that game," he says, his voice less a warning than it is a plea. "Once you start down that road there's no stopping. But." He spreads his hands. "Part of me says yes, we can fix anything, we saved Petra and Misha and our mentors saved us and all the way back, but. This one, I really don't know."

"Yeah," Lyme says. Brutus turns to go, but she reaches out and grabs him by the shoulder. "Wait." Lyme ignores his questioning frown, reaches back into her pocket for the packet of seeds. She steps over behind Brutus, holds out her arm, and lets the extra poppy pods fall onto Clove's grave.

Brutus gives Lyme a long, searching look, and she squares her shoulders and lifts her jaw and dares him to mock her for the sentiment. But instead he only shakes his head, pulls the pouch from his own pocket and upends its contents over the dirt covering Cato's coffin.

Clove's father showed up but Cato's parents didn't bother, just like at the Reaping, and the undertakers took off a little while ago and there's no one else left. The sun's sinking down toward the mountains in the distance, and in a few hours the dying light will paint the field a brilliant, bloody red above the sharp, jagged shadows of the mountains.

"Let's go home," they both say in unison, then glance at each other and let out an identical bark of tired laughter.

A dust trail follows Brutus' truck back up the road, the flowers on the other graves sway in the low summer breeze, and a mockingjay lands between the two smooth limestone headstones and sings four long notes.


End file.
